Related but different: The two concepts of language dominance and language proficiency

Schmeißer, Anika; Hager, Malin; Gil, Laia Arnaus; Jansen, Veronika; Geveler, Jasmin; Eichler, Nadine; Patuto, Marisa; Müller, Natascha

doi:10.1017/cbo9781107375345.003

Cited by 50 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…These results confirmed the distributions of balance and dominance found in preschoolers (Schmeißer et al, 2016) and the benefit of Turkish use at home for Turkish proficiency (Akıncı & Yağmur, 2003). The correlational results, which showed that vocabulary size in German is largely independent from language choice and language balance in the family, whereas Turkish vocabulary can profit from more use of Turkish, are an argument in support of Turkish language use at home.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 83%

Balance and dominance in the vocabulary of German-Turkish primary schoolchildren

Montanari

Akıncı

Abel

2019

European Journal of Applied Linguistics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

2 dilliliğin olumlu bir etkisi gözlemlenmemiştir. Eleştirel bir yaklaşım olarak, aynı testin farklı dillerde sözcük dağarcığını ölçmek için kullanılması, bu testin bazı diller için daha uygun olabileceğine dikkat çekmiştir. ResumenEl bilingüismo equilibrado ha inspirado los debates sobre el bilingüismo durante mucho tiempo, pero ¿con que frecuencia se puede hablar de bilingües equilibrados, ¿tiene el equilibrio un impacto positivo en el dominio del idioma? Y especialmente cuando los niños comienzan a asistir a la escuela y en consecuencia reciben mucha información oral y escrita en el idioma de la escuela, ¿cómo se desarrollan el equilibrio y el dominio? El presente trabajo discute las siguientes preguntas de investigación con respecto al vocabulario: ¿Los resultados equilibrados de las pruebas en dos idiomas se correlacionan mejor que los resultados desequilibrados con una mejor competencia? ¿Y va el uso equilibrado de dos idiomas acompañado de un vocabulario equilibrado? Utilizamos una tarea de identificación de imágenes para poner a prueba el vocabulario productivo y receptivo de 98 escolares germano-turcos en un diseño transversal. Los resultados en alemán y en turco fueron sustraídos para determinar el índíce de equilibrio/dominio respectivo. Las puntuaciones de vocabulario muestran un cambio continuo al dominio en el lenguaje mayoritario. El uso constante del turco tiene un efecto en el vocabulario turco, pero no tiene un impacto negativo en el vocabulario en alemán. No hubo una influencia positiva general del bilingüismo equilibrado. Zusammenfassung Ausgewogenheit hat die Debatten über Bilingualität oft inspiriert; doch wie häufig sind ausgewogene Zweisprachige, und hat Ausgewogenheit einen positiven Einfluss auf Sprachbeherrschung? Diese Fragen untersuchen wir mit dem Fokus auf den ersten Schuljahren, in der die Kinder einen hohen Anteil ihres Inputs in der Schulsprache erhalten. Wir diskutieren die folgenden Forschungsfragen in Bezug auf den Wortschatz: Korrelieren ausgewogene Testergebnisse in zwei Sprachen mit insgesamt stärkeren Testergebnissen? Geht ein ausgewogener Gebrauch von zwei Sprachen mit einem ausgewogenen Wortschatz einher? Dafür wurden 98 Deutsch-Türkisch-sprachige Schülerinnen und Schüler in einem Querschnittsdesign mit einem Bildbenennungstest auf expressiven und rezeptiven Wortschatz untersucht. Durch Subtraktion der türkischen Ergebnisse von den individuellen deutschen Resultaten wurde ein Dominanz-/Balanceindex für jedes Kind errechnet. Die Testergebnisse zeigen eine kontinuierliche Verschiebung zu einer Dominanz in der Mehrheitssprache Deutsch. Die konsequente Verwendung des Türkischen in der Familie wirkt sich positiv auf den türkischen Wortschatz aus, nicht aber negativ auf den deutschen Wortschatz. Wir fanden keinen positiven Effekt von Ausgewogenheit. Als mögliche Einschränkung wird angemerkt, dass die Verwendung desselben Testverfahrens in mehreren Sprachen aufgrund von Testeffekten einzelne Sprachgruppen bevorzugen könnte.

show abstract

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 83%

Balance and dominance in the vocabulary of German-Turkish primary schoolchildren

Montanari

Akıncı

Abel

2019

European Journal of Applied Linguistics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Many of the aforementioned factors have been invoked in the discussion of dominance in bilinguals, and specifically of how dominance should best be measured. In many studies, the dominant language of a bilingual child is assumed to be the majority language of the wider community/country of residence (cf., Polinsky, 2008 ; see however, Schmeißer et al, 2015 for contrasting results). Alternatively, as argued by Unsworth (2015) , current amount of exposure may be taken as a proxy for dominance/relative proficiency, while Treffers-Daller and Korybski (2015) propose that lexical diversity measures fit well as a means to operationalize dominance.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, while the dominance profiles may be similar in two groups of speakers, their absolute proficiency in the two languages may differ significantly (as is the case of e.g., Spanish L2 learners as compared to Spanish heritage speakers in the United States, see Montrul, 2015 ). Furthermore, as demonstrated by Schmeißer et al (2015) , high proficiency in a language does not imply that this language will necessarily be the dominant language for a bilingual child. Moreover, language dominance is not decisive when it comes to grammatical development, specifically cross-linguistic influence.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Furthermore, contra what is commonly believed, the language of the country of residence does not always become the dominant language of a bilingual child, and the one-parent-one-language strategy is neither a necessary nor a sufficient prerequisite for balanced bilingualism. As the authors conclude, “more research on sociolinguistic factors, external to the child, which have been neglected in the past, is needed in order to help formulate recommendations for parents, doctors, and teachers, on how to promote high proficiency levels in the two languages of a bilingual” ( Schmeißer et al, 2015 , p. 64).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Bilinguals’ Sensitivity to Grammatical Gender Cues in Russian: The Role of Cumulative Input, Proficiency, and Dominance

et al. 2018

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper reports on an experimental study investigating the acquisition of grammatical gender in Russian by heritage speakers living in Norway. The participants are 54 Norwegian-Russian bilingual children (4;0–10;2) as well as 107 Russian monolingual controls (3;0–7;0). Previous research has shown that grammatical gender is problematic for bilingual speakers, especially in cases where gender assignment is opaque (Polinsky, 2008; Schwartz et al., 2015; Rodina and Westergaard, 2017). Furthermore, factors such as proficiency and family type (one or two Russian-speaking parents) have been argued to be important. Interestingly, previous findings differ with respect to the kind of errors children make: restructuring to a two-gender system (masculine–feminine, see Polinsky, 2008) or defaulting to masculine (see Rodina and Westergaard, 2017). It is also not clear to what extent children are sensitive to gender cues or whether certain agreement patterns are simply memorized. To investigate this, we used both existing nouns and nonce words and tested both transparent and opaque gender cues. The results were checked against a number of background factors measuring exposure, proficiency, and dominance. Our findings show that bilingual children are clearly sensitive to morphophonological cues for gender assignment. The most common and robust error pattern for all bilinguals involved overgeneralization to masculine (especially affecting neuter and opaque nouns). At the same time, children from families with two Russian-speaking parents and monolinguals also occasionally overused feminine with vowel-final nouns. The following variables were found to be the most reliable predictors of accuracy on grammatical gender tasks: cumulative length of exposure (CLoE) and consistency of input in Russian, as well as the presence of older siblings, with CLoE to Russian being by far the most robust and important predictor. Furthermore, we show that a lexical diversity measure (number of different words in a Russian narrative) is also correlated significantly with the children’s performance on the gender tasks. At the same time, our results indicate that relative measures of dominance (e.g., the difference in exposure between the two languages or the difference in narrative scores) may be redundant when more robust absolute measures are present (CLoE and lexical diversity in the heritage language).

show abstract

“…In studies of the first two to three years of the development of bilingual children, MLU is one of the most widely used measures of language development. It is therefore not surprising that MLU is also frequently employed to operationalize dominance, despite the difficulties involved in comparing it across languages (Deuchar & Muntz 2003, Kupisch 2008, Schmeißer et al 2016, Yip & Matthews 2006. Yip & Matthews (2006) argue that for agglutinating languages such as Turkish, MLU should be computed in morphemes, but for isolating languages such as Cantonese it should be computed in words.…”

Section: Language Dominance In Morphosyntaxmentioning

confidence: 99%

What Defines Language Dominance in Bilinguals?

Treffers‐Daller

2019

Annu. Rev. Linguist.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article focuses on the construct of language dominance in bilinguals and the ways in which this construct has been operationalized. Language dominance is often seen as relative proficiency in two languages, but it can also be analyzed in terms of language use—that is, how frequently bilinguals use their languages and how these are divided across domains. Assessing language dominance is important because it has become clear that the level of bilinguals’ proficiency in each language and the relative strength of each language affect performance on tasks. A key distinction is made between direct measures of language dominance, which assess an aspect of language proficiency (e.g., vocabulary or grammar), and indirect ones, which measure variability in exposure to different languages and bilinguals’ use of them. The article includes an evaluation of the extent to which the latter can be interpreted as a proxy for the former.

show abstract

Related but different: The two concepts of language dominance and language proficiency

Cited by 50 publications

References 0 publications

Balance and dominance in the vocabulary of German-Turkish primary schoolchildren

Balance and dominance in the vocabulary of German-Turkish primary schoolchildren

Bilinguals’ Sensitivity to Grammatical Gender Cues in Russian: The Role of Cumulative Input, Proficiency, and Dominance

What Defines Language Dominance in Bilinguals?

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About